United Nations

PRESS RELEASE – 6 OCTOBER 2025 LAY DOWN YOUR ARMSPEACE PRIZE FOR 2025 is awarded Francesca Albanese The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories – as the person who, in accordance with Alfred Nobel’s will, has “done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations and for the abolition or reduction of standing armies as well as for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” Francesca Albanese has forcefully and unwaveringly worked against Israel’s full-scale war on the occupied Palestinian territories, in particular Israel´s ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people. She has confronted Israel’s systematic war crimes and crimes against humanity in a truly global outreach. Further, she has brought governments, international organisations and people’s groups together to underline the responsibility of the world at large to act and to stop arming, enabling, and profiting from Israel’s ongoing criminal actions. But first of all, Albanese...

This is the third appeal from TFF. The first and the second here. On August 22, 2025, the UN officially declared famine in Gaza. The world’s top authority on food security called for help and said starvation will spread further within the Strip unless fighting stops and much more aid is allowed in. More than half a million people in the Gaza Strip are facing catastrophic hunger conditions, while more than a million more are in a food emergency phase, the report states. This man-made catastrophic famine could have been prevented by a steady flow of humanitarian aid into the enclave, relief chief Tom Fletcher pointed out. “Yet food stacks up at borders because of systematic obstruction by Israel,” Mr. Fletcher said. “It is a famine within a few 100 meters of food in a fertile land.” The UN’s top aid official underscored that the famine in Gaza is “caused by cruelty, justified...

Contrary to what we stated when publishing this Call, the UN General Assembly (GA) opened on September 9, 2025, in New York, not in Geneva, as we initially wrote. However, due to the host role-violating US ban on visas to Palestinians, the Special GA Segment on Palestine will be held in the UN Geneva from September 22. And it builds up to something historic. Anyhow, here is what we believe you must advocate or do to help stop the Israeli genocide. It’s called people’s power or citizens’ diplomacy. SHARE! The first of three appeals from TFF. The second is here, and the third here. Across the world, people are witnessing the systematic destruction of Palestinian lives, homes, and communities. The scale and intensity of Israel’s military operations — especially in Gaza — have led leading legal bodies, including the International Court of Justice, to warn of a plausible genocide. The...

Editorial for Transcend Media Service, TMS, and published in an edited Q & A version by the China Social Science Network-China Social Science News. See also this follow-up, “Condemn all UN member states: They spend 100 times more on militarism than on the entire UN system.” The UN has been extremely important over the last 80 years in terms of, for instance, global dialogue, multi-dimensional development, international law, peace-keeping, normativity, violence condemnation, and ethics. It has been the place to hold member states accountable. The UN Charter is the most Gandhian document ever signed by the world’s governments. If the great majority of member states lived up to their obligations in accordance with the UN Charter and including the resolutions they have signed up to, the world would be a much more peaceful, just, democratic, and lawful place. Regrettably, there are several reasons why the world is not in accordance with those fine Charter norms and provisions:a) The majority...

Professor Zhang Weiwei is a highly respected Chinese intellectual and professor at Fudan University in Shanghai. He is the director of its China Institute and also runs a series of conversations with many different people around the world. Here is what came out of their meetings there and in Skopje, Macedonia in October 2024: & ◪ As you can see, also at the end of the second one, we both enjoy win-win exchanges like these about world order issues. Zhang Weiwei is known for using videos and social media to reach a large audience in China and worldwide. We suggest you see many more of Zhang Weiwei’s conversations – like recently with Professor Jeffrey Sachs – on the Thinkers’ Forum on YouTube. PS TFF posts hundreds of videos, its own and those of others, in our Video Collections on TFF Substack – including those that appear on YouTube. However, TFF...

The text below was published in “The Nation” on July 15, 2025, appears here unmodified. The delay is due to a weak Internet here in Turkey. There has been much critical reaction to this US Government defamatory statement justifying the imposition of sanctions on this exceptional independent expert appointed by the UN to an unpaid position, and left to hang in the wind by the politically motivated show of indifference by the UN Secretariat.] Justifying US Sanctions US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, in a dazzling Orwellian display inverted reality by slapping sanctions on Francesca Albanese, the much-embattled UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories of East Jerusalem, West Bank, and Gaza. If the sanctions are implemented against this extraordinary citizen of Italy, in the face of strong UN objections, Albanese will be barred from entering the US, presumably even to discharge her annual UN duty to present a...

Does she think we are idiots? Does Denmark’s foreign policy establishment? I am a Danish citizen, and this fraudulent speech with a gross lie through omission is morally and politically unacceptable. H. E. Ambassador, Christina Markus Lassen, spoke at the UN Security Council’s urgent meeting caused by Israel’s attack on Iran. Read her short – shocking – speech here. She is an experienced Danish diplomat, partly educated in the US (of course), and has been her country’s ambassador to Syria, where she collaborated with the US (the famous Mr Ford!), France, and the UK to shape a “Western approach” – to changing the government of Bashar al-Assad, one must assume. Perversely as hard to believe, she does not mention that Israel has attacked Iran! No, she starts with the US/Israeli mantra – they are both major nuclear powers, of course – that Iran shall never be allowed to have nuclear...

War-preparation and militarism are now the main factors that keep the West together, and will make it fall faster. The Western world has lost its consciousness, perception, and instruments of conflict analysis, resolution, peace-making, and reconciliation. They’ve been squeezed out by militarism’s kakistocrats – a political science term that means government by “the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous people.” Consequently, there is now a risk of more than 50% that a major war will happen in Europe. I’ve been observing silently for weeks and months now how geopolitical experts – also very qualified ones – and people who comment independently as well as in the mainstream media and many others have worked on the tacit, implicit assumption that President Trump would help create peace in Ukraine; they seem to believe that what we have witnessed has anything to do with knowledge-based, professional peace-making or would have even the slightest...

It has great potentials and needs global citizens’ – your – support. Amid global conflicts escalating, why has the United Nations, tasked with maintaining peace, seemingly failed to fulfill its role? Why is a ceasefire agreement in Gaza proving elusive, and why does a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine remain distant? Professor Jan Oberg delves into the underlying reasons why achieving world peace is such a challenging endeavour. This video was produced by The China Academy in Shanghai, more about it here. You may also see it on YouTube and read the interesting comments on it.

Sustainable peace is not merely the absence of war but the presence of development, justice and harmony The three authors were published today by China Watch & China Daily’s English edition. It will also be published in Chinese and thereby reach a very large audience. The article also represents the first cooperative effort between Guangdong Institute for International Strategies and TFF. Li Xing who is a Yunshan leading scholar and a distinguished professor at Guangdong Institute for International Strategies, and professor of international relations at Aalborg University, Denmark. Jan Oberg is a former professor and co-founder and director of the independent Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, Sweden. Li Qing is professor and executive president at the Guangdong Institute for International Strategies. The authors contributed this article to China Watch, a think tank powered by China Daily. Now head over to China Daily > >

Contemporary reports of the birth of the United Nations in June 1945 in San Francisco warmly welcomed the news of its establishment and congratulated the United States for conceiving and delivering the new international organisation. President Truman’s remarks at the closing ceremony – “what a great day this can be in history” – were widely shared. There were enormous expectations that, in contrast to the discredited League of Nations, there was now a strong institution that would keep the peace and promote international cooperation. The momentum of San Francisco was maintained in the later months of 1945 in London where with the new Labour government and decisive leadership from the Foreign Office, the necessary practical measures were taken very quickly to put in place the principal organs, especially the Security Council, the General Assembly and the secretariat. A major deficiency of the Charter – the absence of provisions on human...